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Day 16 – Lower Perth: Rest Day, Interesting Neighbors and Good News from Warmshowers

Today, I did pretty much nothing other than sleeping, eating, swimming and chatting with the neighbors. However, that was really interesting.

My neighbor Jerry from Southern Alberta had seen me arriving with my bike yesterday and was curious. He invited me over for a coffee and scrambled eggs with bacon in the morning and wanted to hear my story while he was grinding some Marihuana for his morning joint.

He told me that he had been part of the freedom convoy in the January 2022 when a couple of thousand truckers were heading towards Ottawa holding the city in a kind of siege for several days.

It started as a peaceful protest against mandatory vaccinations for truckers who had to cross the border to the US but then became much bigger and was used by mostly right-winged groups to make a statement of their protest against the overall COVID policy of their government.

Here is some background:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22926134/canada-trucker-freedom-convoy-protest-ottawa

Jerry had been sentenced for two years in prison for conspiracy for murder and unlicensed possession of dangerous weapons.

He had served together with murder convicts and had just come out of prison 5 months ago. He considered himself to be political prisoner.

What a story! All accusations were totally falls, he claimed. The weapons had been planted by the police and the entire trial had been a farce performed by a corrupt legal system.

Later his wife Jaqueline joined the conversation. She was originally from New Brunswick but was working in Alberta since many years.

She was giving me a tour de force through their political belief system which resembled a Canadian version of the German “Reichsbürger” mindset:

Ok, that was hard to stomach. It was presented so forcefully and eloquently that I hardly found words other than “ok, that’s interesting”.

The sheer belief that there was one strong hidden force which was consistently pulling the strings in the dark since many dozens of years was so outlandish. I mean, King Charles leading the entire UN? Really?

But it was a closed belief system that I had encountered already several times since cycling through Canada. Only the notion with the British Crown was new to me.

Apparently, King Charles only pretended to not be so forceful to deceive everyone else.

When the opportunity presented itself, I thanked them for their hospitality and wished them a great day.

On a lighter note, I reached out to many Warmshowers hosts along the rest of my way to Newfoundland and had gotten several positive responses already.

Finally this also was starting to work out.

I went for dinner early and was looking forward to hitting the road again tomorrow.

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